Drowned in the stream of consciousness
Review: "let me tell you" and "let me go on" by Paul Griffiths (NYRB, April)
let me tell you and let me go on by Paul Griffiths (April 22, 2025; New York Review Books)
1.
It shouldn’t work, but it does.
2.
Before we get too deep, it’s worth noting that the first book in this pair, let me tell you, is the basis for the best piece of classical music of the 21st century (according to the Guardian). You may want to listen to it as you read along, or save it for later. It’s also worth noting that Brett Dean’s Hamlet only came in at No. 18.
3.
Paul Griffiths is a novelist, a librettist, a classical music critic, an Oulipian, and a Welshman. Not necessarily in that order.
4.
As an Oulipian, Griffiths sets arbitrary constraints on his writing—in the case of let me tell you and let me go on, the vocabulary of the novels is limited to the words spoken by Ophelia throughout Hamlet—either 481 words or 483 words, depending on who you trust.
5.
The most famous Oulipian is probably Georges Perec. His 1969 novel, La Disparition, famously did not use the letter “e,” a challenge he picked up from Earnest Vincent Wright’s 1939 novel, Gadsby. Is Perec becoming fashionable? Though not an example of constrained writing, Vincenzo Latronico’s recent novel, Perfection (My review), also published in the U.S. by New York Review Books, explicitly takes cues from Perec’s work. He’s having a moment, at least among NYRB editors.
6.
Of course, I can’t talk about the Oulipians without thinking of Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Theme for the Eulipions,” which, while unrelated, is not completely off topic.
When you walk into desolation like that
And suddenly, out of nowhere, comes a warm song
You aren't about to forget it
7.
Griffith’s intention with these novels is to give Ophelia a voice while acknowledging that her ability to speak has been constrained by design—both by the literal text and by the role she has to play.
The first book, let me tell you, is a prose poem that gives Ophelia a backstory, exploring her upbringing and youth prior to the events of Hamlet. The second, let me go on, is a metafictional experiment that imagines what happens to a fictional character once they’ve played out their part.
In both books, Ophelia relates her story in the first person. By leaning in to Ophelia’s limitations, Griffiths hopes to help her rise above them. Though it sounds gimmicky, the result is actually quite compelling. Like I said, it shouldn’t work, but it does.
8.
You don’t necessarily need to be familiar with Hamlet to enjoy let me tell you. It stands on its own, and the beauty and lyricism of the prose is enough to draw you in and put you under its spell. But to fully enjoy large swaths of let me go on, some familiarity with the broader Shakespearean corpus is recommended. Griffiths does provide a key to the allusions at the end, but that’s not much help when you’re in the thick of things. Don’t let that dissuade you, though—being a little lost and uncertain is part of the charm of these books and is, to some degree, purposeful.
9.
In let me tell you, Ophelia reveals to us her childhood, mostly as it revolves around a maid who minds her and her brother, a maid who appears to have foreknowledge of her fate and vainly attempts to prepare her for the role she’s expected to play in the future. Together, they visit an oracle, the Lady Profound, who dispels the maid’s hopes.
‘S’-s’-speech i’-i’-is locked and cannot be blown here and there, one way and another, by the will. Not by your will and not by mine. T’-t’-take mind: you have no way to find for yourself what to say; you cannot do so. There is one that lay down your words for you. And mine. Do not blame my words, for I did not make them up. They are made for me, as i’-i’-indeed are yours for you. Truly, my sweet, I do not give a doublet.’
Fate is what it is, then.
10.
The books owe much to Tom Stoppard’s extraordinary Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), in which the two minor characters slowly come to realize they are not masters of their own fate, but are in fact inescapably beholden to the plot of a play that has little concern for them. Someone who’s not familiar with Hamlet should read Griffiths and Stoppard and then try to reconstruct the plot of Hamlet from what they glean from them. I’d be interested to see what they came up with.
Here’s my favorite line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead:
GUILDENSTERN: If we have a destiny, then so had he—and if this is ours, then that was his—and if there are no explanations for us, then let there be none for him.
The film version, starring Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, and Richard Dreyfuss, is worth checking out.
11.
Ophelia’s words flow like a river, slipping over one another in a rush of effusive feeling that gives Griffiths’ books an almost mystic character; because of the constraints on her vocabulary, Griffith is forced to refer to characters and events obliquely, allusively. We hear her thoughts in what seems like real time—they are unstructured, unrefined, a pure stream of consciousness that reflects the struggle to perceive and make sense of her environment and the events that are transpiring around her. If you’ll excuse the pun, the effect is immersive.
9.
Griffiths’ novels often build on existing texts. In Mr. Beethoven (NYRB, 2020), Griffiths imagined what might have happened had Beethoven accepted a proposed commission from Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society instead of ignoring it and then dying, as he did in real life. Griffiths drew all of his Beethoven character’s dialogue from the composer’s letters and from the written “conversation books” that he used to communicate with others after his hearing had failed. So everything Beethoven expresses in the book is something Beethoven actually expressed, in some form, during his life, albeit in a different context. The narrative of the book is then built around those reconstructed sentiments.
10.
I remember having a conversation with a friend about Terrence Malick’s The New World. They had not enjoyed it; Malick’s loose, immersive style didn’t agree with them. They wanted more story, more plot. I disagreed. If you want to know the beat-by-beat details of the Pocahontas legend, go watch the Disney version. What I found so compelling about Malick’s take was that, by assuming we all knew the plot of the story already, he could instead focus on how it must have felt. And so I came away from the movie having felt like I’d experienced it, which felt so much more important than merely sitting through another rote recitation of the story. It was like the difference between a representative portrait of a landscape and an impressionistic one, the latter being more concerned with the feelings engendered by the scene than in its precise appearance.
This is what Griffiths is doing in these novels. You will not always know what’s going on or understand the meaning or import of what’s happening. But you’ll feel it, if you allow yourself to. If you want the plot, by all means, read Hamlet or at least its Wikipedia page. But if you read Griffiths, prepare yourself to be perplexed—much as Ophelia is—and give yourself up to the fact that this is an irreverent emotional and sensory exploration of her story, not one that is concerned with concrete detail or plot or even internal consistency and continuity.
Basically: Go with the flow.
11.
I reviewed Mr. Beethoven for the Boston Globe. Shortly thereafter, in 2022, I was asked to lead a discussion with Griffiths and representatives of the Handel and Haydn Society about the history behind the book.
Towards the end (51m 49s), he speaks briefly about let me tell you and mentions that he’s currently working on the book that would become let me go on.
12.
Once, over breakfast, my wife asked me what I was thinking about. (I had been staring off into space.) I told her I was wondering if you could write an animal version of Hamlet. Later that day, I remembered that’s what The Lion King is.
13.
The cover art is disappointing, especially by New York Review Books standards. The rigidity of the maze is at odds with the fluidity of the prose and the narrative. I mean, just look at the art for Sonya Walger’s Lion from this past February. Perfect.
14.
I wrote something here, then thought better of it and deleted it. But I didn’t want to renumber all the subsequent points. So this is number 14. Pardon the laziness.
15.
I think my favorite part of Hamlet is Act 3, Scene 4, in Gertrude’s bedchamber. Hamlet has just murdered Polonius and is being pretty awful to his mother, all things considered. Suddenly, his father’s ghost reappears to tell him to chill out and stay focused.
This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
At the beginning, he very explicitly told him to lay off Gertrude.
But, howsoever thou pursues this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught.
I just like the idea of a ghost being impatient and annoyed, having to pull the spectral equivalent of “Per my last email…”
A lot is made of the procrastination of Hamlet fils, but why is Hamlet père in such a hurry? He’s dead.
16.
In let me go on, Ophelia has entered a vast, white void following her tragic exit from the events of Hamlet. Here, Griffiths has her encounter a succession of strangers as she tries to come to grips with her purpose now that her dramatic utility has come to an end.
The strangers, all characters from other Shakespearean plays, each give her some advice on what to do and where to go, some of it helpful, some of it not. Is this a little too twee? Perhaps. But it’s also a lot of fun. And out of the silliness, Griffiths manages to steer Ophelia to someplace affecting and profound, an epiphany that derives directly from the Oulipian limitation of the book but speaks to something even bigger, as well.
But look, if the words are all given you, what they say is not. If there’s love in them, you have that love in your heart, with all its expectation and its hope, all its light of heaven on the morning grass in a day that goes on and on whilst the sun’s stayed where it is and made the night go away as if that night was nothing more than something seen, let’s say, out of a bended window. I know these things. It’s become your love. It’s not that it would seem that way: it is. And these are your words.
17.
I really love Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour film version of Hamlet. But in playing the title role, I think he could’ve stood to dial it back a few degrees. Everyone else is playing it very casually, while he chews on every line. It kind of reads like “THIS! IS! SHAKESPEARE!” while everyone else around him (Derek Jacobi as Claudius, Nicholas Farrell as Horatio) is playing it real cool, making Shakespeare seem like the most natural thing in the world. Kate Winslet played Ophelia; a year later, she would not drown in Titanic.
18.
Of special note is the part of let me go on where Ophelia meets herself, or rather, a more rudimentary version of herself: Ofelia, from the messy, much-debated Quarto 1 version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s the closest she comes to a true rapport with someone.
You know what I know—which is that love is fear.
19.
I know Shakespearean productions in unconventional settings is kind of a cliche, but I really enjoyed the Donmar Warehouse production of Julius Caesar, which featured an all-women cast and was loosely set within a women’s prison.
20.
So let me go on is the sillier, more farcical of the two books, and yet, its ending, its inevitable ending, has Ophelia reaching out to you, the reader, having arrived at the final stage of her understanding of the nature of her existence. “You have something I do not have. This is what I ask you now to give me,” she says.
I won’t spoil the rest; suffice it to say that I got all choked up over it, a real surprise after the funny business that preceded it. But Griffiths manages to close the book with an ending that highlights what’s so wonderful about literature, about the power and beauty of reading, of drama, of theater, the wonder of imbuing imaginary characters with life and emotion and feeling, of building a relationship with something that exists only in your mind or that sprung from the minds of others, and doing so across time and space and even the bounds of reality.
He reminds us that we aren’t just passive consumers of literature. We have a part to play in all this, too. When we engage with fiction, we help make it real.
21.
It shouldn’t work. But it does.
Michael Patrick Brady is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. His criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Millions, among others. His short fiction about aspiring ghosts, trivial psychics, and petty saboteurs has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, CHEAP POP, BULL, Maudlin House, Flash Fiction Online, Flash Fiction Magazine, Ink In Thirds, and Uncharted. He is currently working on a novel. Find him at www.michaelpatrickbrady.com.
Glad to hear a little more about this, and especially to learn that it is rooted in Oulipo, which very much shouldn't work but does.
One thing; for some reason, a great many people summarize La Disparition as you do, and I guess presuming it is obvious to most readers do not spell out the REASON for it. Without -e, you cannot write in the feminine in French. Perec was born in 1936, his father died in combat during the invasion of France, and his mother died in the Holocaust. The aching, seething, and neverending absence of her, of the feminine, is the reason for the constraint. Like Sebald's The Emigrants, where you gradually realize that the text is riddled with absences, the FEELING that hits you is the point, not merely the intellectual game. Another Oulipian, Jacques Roubaud, used the constraints in his grief wails for the loss of his wife. Oulipo sounds very fey and abstract, but almost always the constraints enliven and enrich their products.
The Void is the title of the translation of the novel, and to my mind rather unsubtly refers to the thing that is meant not to be referred to. Anyway, Perec and Queneau and Oulipo are great and deserve more anglophilic moments.
As a side note, Modiano's novels also often revolve around absence and loss in this obsessive, scab-picking way that makes the experience much richer and more emotionally satisfying than the plots would have you expect.